May 2, 2014

IT’S TELLING THAT THAT’S THEIR MAIN GOAL: The Counterattack: Has the Republican establishment finally found a way to vanquish the tea party? If the Tea Party is “vanquished,” there are two likely outcomes. One is that a lot of voters get demoralized and stay home. The other is a third party. Neither is a good thing for the GOP — if, that is, its goal is to win on a national scale. And while the Tea Party gets blame for loser candidates like Christine O’Donnell or Sharron Angle, the establishment has thrown up plenty of losers of its own. Meanwhile all the energy comes from Tea Party backed candidates like Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Rand Paul. “Electability” is fine. But selecting for tractability isn’t.

You must be kidding. That is pure insanity. You want to see Harry "Domestic Terrorist" Reid remain the Majority Speaker? To have Hillary Clinton as POTUS? To have Nancy Pelosi back in control of the House? That is nutty. And greatly blurs reality. We have Obamacare due to the empowerment of the Democratic Party. That is what the Democrats have provided. A train wreck.

IT’S TELLING THAT THAT’S THEIR MAIN GOALProf Reynolds, you have previously implied you blamed both sides for the lack of unity in the GOP.

But the main goal of the Tea Party isn't to throw out GOP politicians, it is to elect GOP politicians that will reliably vote for conservative laws, and will reliably not betray the GOP to vote for progressive agenda items.

So the best way for the Establish GOP to "vanquish" the Tea Party would be to reliably support the conservative agenda.

Okay, so we are talking past each other again. When Mitch McConnell who is plenty conservative says "independent conservative candidate" or Tea party, he is thinking of Todd Aikin who lost us a "can't lose" race in Missouri. When we say establishment, honestly, and be honest, are you really thinking of Mitch McConnell or John Cornyn? I doubt it, save for some intemperate statements, we really mean John McCain, Lindsy Graham and the real RINOs.

Do we really think the "establishment" is going to go after Ted Cruz on reelection. I'm not saying they like him, but he's a winner, and they are a lot more interested in keeping their chairs than ideological purity.

Are we really talking past each other? Senator Minority Leader Mcconnell stated earlier last monthg that any Tea Partier challenger will be crushed all across the country. That's talking past the Tea Party members? Really?

Mitch McConnell, even though he supported the START nuclear treaty, is overall a very good conservative. The issue I with him is that he was willing to go to war over Ted Cruz and the Tea Party. Ted Cruz was willing to do what his constituents, of which I am one, wanted and attempt to defund Obamacare. McConnell wanted none of that, period.

Today, we have Republicans saying that Obamacare is here to stay. Why? Because people like Mitch McConnel, while conservative, don't have the balls to really fight, publicly and messily, the Democrats. He, and others of like mind, only have the balls to fight Republicans.

You can vote meaningless opposition votes till the Fat Lady Sings, but when it comes to actually doing what you can to end things Obamacare, Mitch McConnel, et al, are extremely absent!

If McConnell is thinking Todd Akin when saying Tea Party, then McConnell is an idiot playing into the Democrat hands.

Akin was the Democrat choice. Seriously, the Democrats spent over $1,000,000 to help Akin win the primary because that was the one candidate that McCaskill was sure to beat. Further, the Tea Party Express endorsed Sarah Steelman. I'm really tired of people equating Akin to the Tea Party.

The establishment GOP may well end up winning. I will guarantee that it'll be a Pyrrhic victory if they do, at least as far as winning elections is concerned (if the establishment GOP is even interested in that any longer).

I am not a Republican, but this needs to be said, The Republican Party is really the big tent party. It includes people who don't really agree with one another. The establishment faction could be called the 'Anti-communist, Pro-America' faction. This is the faction of Nixon, Mccain, and others like him. They are not really free-market, libertarian type people. Nixon implemented wage and price controls and wanted a National Health Service like Britain's. He was stymied by Ted Kennedy who did not want Republicans to get credit for it. The reason these people are in the Republican Party is because there is no room for a pro-American, anti-communist, in the Democrat Party. The small government, free market part of the Republican Party was led by Barry Goldwater, and carried forward by Ronald Reagan. Reagan, who was disdained by the establishment bunch, was able to get the two sides together by being sufficiently anti-communist and pro-American in foreign affairs. He also compromised on other stuff that he should not have.

Now that Russia has become a new threat, perhaps the pro-America, free-market coalition can be reestablished.

1. The GOP establishment consists of people who are at least somewhat conservative by inclination, but have to fight continuously against Democrats, the media, academia, and the entertainment industry, and have grown gun-shy about making actual arguments in favor of their positions. So they are careful and guarded as to what they truly believe, and when the time comes, they pounce on a way to help their disoriented constituents. This means they would see the Tea Party as hopeless naïfs on a fool's errand.

2. The GOP establishment consists of porcine politicos with forked tongues who are exactly, precisely like the Democrats they nominally oppose. They like the same things Democrats like, and for the same reasons -- big government, overspending, overweening power, etc. They do not fight for their ideas because they have few of them and are even less interested in stirring up trouble, which could upset their position at the trough. Their misfortune lies in the unfortunate fact that their "market" -- their base -- hates the things they like. (Democrats don't have that problem.) So they are forced to pretend that they still fight hard for their base's ideals when they can, and oh it's such a thankless job, so go away and quit bothering me, but please vote for me. They would see the Tea Party as a threat to their position within the GOP.

The first proposition is congruent with the characterization of the GOP as the "stupid party." You're certainly not going to win over the media with no arguments, so it would behoove the GOP to learn to make good arguments, if achieving their espoused ideas is their goal.

The second proposition, however, is more congruent with the observed facts: hostility to the Tea Party; constantly trying to work backdoor deals with Democrats, taking positions on issues that are anathema to their voters; insulting their own base when they can't get their way; refusing to open up potentially rich new offensives in a target-rich environment of Democratic corruption and out-of-control big government; always, in other words, playing defense, which is a loser's strategy. This would make the GOP, in reality, not the "stupid" party at all, but the treacherous party.

So, which view you take depends on how much, or little, intelligence you credit to the GOP establishment. Karl Rove is supposed to be a pretty smart fellow.

The Establishment Republicans are doomed as far as control of the Republican Party is concerned. When the leadership starts fighting the grass-roots the best they can get is a holding action. See the Democrats, 1968 & 1972.

There has never been a “small government” political party in American politics going back to the time of the Civil War. In 1865, Lincoln’s Republican party was a big government, big business party. It was also the “civil rights” party because that was a good tool to use to crush the defeated South. The Republicans dominated American politics until the Progressive era. Republicans and Democrats both grappled with how to deal with the challenge posed by the Progressives. Teddy Roosevelt’s response was more central government with things like anti-trust law. World War I interrupted the show. The 1920s got more Republican big business government (remember Teapot Dome?). The 1930s brought Depression and a race between Republicans and Democrats to big government. Herbert Hoover started down the road to centralization that was then picked up by FDR. Republicans opposed FDR not because he was big government, but because he was seen as anti-big business. World War II saw the introduction of massive central planning. Following WWII, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower gave us the largest socialist public works project in American history, the Interstate Highway system. Not only was that socialism pure and simple, it was the essence of crony capitalism as it paid for the infrastructure needed by major trucking companies. No comparable subsidy was offered to the rail roads (which remained heavily rate regulated). The story following Ike is more of the same. No matter which party has been in power we see legislative payoffs to favored industries. The Tea Party needs to wake up and realize they have been scammed. The GOP never was, and never will be the party of smaller government. The late Lee Atwater crafted the smaller government message for the GOP as a tool to bring in fallen Southern Democrats, the old George Wallace coalition. The tactic worked. The modern Tea Party grows out of the sentiments that animated the Wallacites and the Perot voters. It will only find its way when it wises up and starts its own party.

FDR wasn't against big business, per se. He favored even bigger business, including trusts and consortiums, so long as they did what he wanted them to do. NIRA.

The railroads got their own subsidies in their build-out period, both money and land. The Interstate Highway system was no more socialism than previous state highway programs. It just got done faster, due to a comprehensive organizational plan. There are some things that many competing companies do not do well, and road-building is one of them.

Tea Party = Wallacites? Bulls*it. The Wallace folks were motivated almost entirely by race, and Wallace himself was a huge fiscal liberal. The Perot connection is a lot more apt, as both movements are bourgeois revolts.

Re Wallace. You need to read an article by a Penn State Professor J. Michael Hogan entitled Wallace and the Wallacites: A Rexamination. I think it was published in the Southern Journal of Communication in 1984. Hogan looked closely at survey data. The Wallacites and the Tea Party are virtually identical. it is the same people.

George Wallace was a racist and a segregationalist. His appeal was to disgruntled white, southern Democrats. He was a Democrat before he run under the American Indpendent Party and then became a Democrat again. In 1970, he ran and won a very racist campaign to win the Alabama governorship.

No, the GOP isn't just a flip of Southern racist Democrats. Almost of the Dixiecrats, supporters and actual politicians, went back into the Democrat fold. The Southern Stragey, as is being intimated, was a project that both political parties engaged in. LBJ himself not only threw out an all black Mississippi delegation in the 1964 Democratic Convention because they were not the official all white one, but was one of the 7 Southern Democrats who gutted Eisenhowers Civil Rights law in 1957 (the same exact one he signed into law later on as President and only because almost all of the Republicans voted for it while almost of the Democrats rejected it).

Moreover, are we to assume that this strategy and it's Republican creators were soo far seeing that they knew it take till the 21st Century till finalize their goals? Yes, most of the South didn't fully flip Republican till the 2000s.

It is emphatically about race: which does not make the Tea Party racist. Recall Paul Ryan’s speech a few weeks back attacking inner city culture and the welfare state? That was an express appeal to Tea Party types. Ryan was reaching out by saying the mainstream GOP feels just what you feel. Tea Party types feel resentment over high taxes because they see their money being given away to others with no purpose. That was Ryan’s point. The fact is that beyond small government slogans, Tea Party members themselves are wobbly. If you talk with them program by program they are hard pressed to support smaller government. Do they want fewer Federal meat inspectors? Do they want fewer immigration agents at the border? Do they want fewer scientists at the FDA evaluating drug studies? Do they want fewer officials at the SEC enforcing insider trading laws? Do they want the Navy to cancel the next big deck aircraft carrier? Not really.

The GOP in it's 1860 party plaform derided the corrupt practices of the Democrats in office. They denounce as treasonous the disunion utterings of Democrats. The decried that the federal government was trying to exert its influence over all the other states in matters that is not in their authority. The GOP also explicitly denounced the extravagant spending under the Democrat administration and championed state's rights (not for slavery or leaving the Union of course). Dang, I didn't know the Wallacites (?) existed that long ago.

And then what did Republicans do? They went to war with those states who no longer wanted to be part of the Union. They suspended Habeas Corpus. They passed a draft and an income tax. They appropriated massive railroad subsidies for the transcontinental railroad. They passed a Federal Education mandate, the Morrill Act, to micro manage and subsidize state college construction. Which is exactly the point about Republicans: they say small government and then they embrace big government and crony capitalism when they get elected.

Government is good for certain things. I am conservative who believes we should still have a space program alongside with the private sector and that U.S. Postal service is avalid government entity that needs not be run like a business, but need not be wasteful either. The GOP has a long standing tradition of championing smaller government with less government spending. Sure, the critique that once in office they go big government is valid.

My issue is you racial assertions that make no sense. Not an ounce. The GOP also has a long standing tradition of promoting civil rights, unlike the Dems. There is no evidence anywhere that there was this massive racial white shift in voting.

For the record, the South was gaining massive amounts of minorities, especially blacks coming back from the North, when this "strategy" was supposed to be in effect. Moreover, the South was and still is under direct federal control in electiions with any amount of oppression being reported and investigated.

I want NO government meat inspectors or drug approvers or other "services" that the private sector can do just as well. Consider Underwriters Laboratories as the model. Or do you think we need federal electrical safety inspectors?

Police and military powers are different, and only a fool or a weasel would conflate them.

Road socialist (a term of art among those who favor libertarianism) Dwight Eisenhower warned us that the Military Industrial Complex was just like the Welfare State (or the Department of Health Education and Welfare that he created). The money spent by the Pentagon on favored contractors or planning to fight the last war could much better be left in taxpayer wallets. What you call "Police" is the war on drugs and the other Republican favorite tools that are now, ironically, being turned on the Tea Party by Obama. Your meat inspector is your bureau of land management is your FDA scientist, is your IRS agent, is your DEA agent, etc.

Attacking the welfare state is no more racist than supporting it is. Inner city culture has been attacked by all kinds of people as sick and dysfunctional. Becasue it is, and saying it is not is the not-so-subtle racism of "well, what do you expect from these people?"

Dear Casey MI never suggested that attacking the welfare state was racist. However, attacking the welfare state may be making the budget debate one about race. Ryan is reaching out to the Tea Party by saying: The GOP establishment does not want to keep giving money to those people over there. "Those people" are African Americans who live in the inner city. The GOP "small government" message is: let's stop giving money to black people. That was Wallace's message. That was Nixon's message. That was the famous "Willy Horton" commercial message. That is the message today. Call it what you want.

So it's illegitimate to argue against continuing programs that have produced generations of failure, because "it's racist." Or perhaps you want to argue that, like education, all we need is more money and then a miracle happens.

The GOP has consistently railed against big government and its spending. It's in the party's own platform from Lincoln's time onward. It is a core Republican party plank and belief. Fighting for and achieving the notions provided for in the Declaration of Independence (all men are created equal) is not a big government idea in belief or action. Progressive, yes, has infected both parties.

You fail to appreciate just how Republicans have operated to reward their cronies. Everyone knows Lincoln was a tool of the railroads and the Federal Government gave railroads land and other subsidies during the Lincoln years. In the following year, the public grew weary of abuse at the hands of railroads. Some measure of relief was obtained for the public when the ICC was created during Democratic President Grover Cleveland’s years. But the ICC was toothless. Then the Republicans switched sides on railroads. The ICC was given substantially increased authority and strong powers to control rates during the Republican Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft years. Democrat Woodrow Wilson gave back to the railroads by guaranteeing them a fair profit. Under Coolidge and Hoover the ICC proposed a plan to compel railroad consolidation. By the Eisenhower years ICC power was stifling and legislation passed by Republicans again increased ICC control by giving it power over railroad business decisions to discontinue service. Recall, Ike was subsidizing trucking. Thus by the 1950s Republicans were beating up railroads to help their big business friends who wanted cheap means to ship goods to market. Democrat Jack Kennedy ran against extreme ICC railroad regulation. LBJ moved in part to create the Department of Transportation to strip some of the ICC’s stranglehold on rails. And Democratic President Jimmy Carter supported passage of legislation that finally deregulated railroad rates and brought health back to the industry. Recall also that Jimmy Carter deregulated airline ticket prices from Civil Aeronautics board rules.

We could tell the same story about why Ike created HEW, Nixon gave us OSHA and the EPA, and why Reagan never abolished the Department of Education.

> If an elected GOP entity is sound, proven, electable, effective, has a great Gun Rights - Pro LIfe record, why jump to sabotage them? And why isn't the focus, which is the original Tea Party offering based on obscene deficits, irresponsible spending, oppressive taxation?

"Tired old" thinks that we should support someone because of their position on guns and abortion because we're concerned about economic issues. Right.

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